Can you provide a summary of Satoshi’s argument here? I’m failing to see how the usage of electricity, which is an entropy-losing process, leads to added value through bitcoin
I think I understand Bitcoin well enough to detect that you don't know what you're talking about.
One could argue that a higher current difficulty increases trust in very recent transactions, thereby raising the unitility of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange (ha!) and thus affecting the price.
But that effect is small and we're talking about the difficulty during the last 10 blocks, at most.